H: Stone Guard ?'s

Our guild is going to be getting into Heroics tonight and I had a couple questions about the Heroic Stone Guard encounter. I wanna make sure I understand this correctly. When you click the crystal you get 10 stacks to paint 10 tiles. So to get a raid wide 100% damage/spirit bonus a single person would have to click it 10 times. Right? Obviously we aren't going to just have 1 person do it....im just saying. Also who in the raid should be "painting" the floors to be most effective? If we have 2 people do it I was thinking of having our Resto Shaman and Elemental Shaman do it since they both have the 40% damage reduction CD and the Ele Shaman can still cast while moving. Any other suggestions? I heard there is also another method to just let all the dps click it so it gets done super fast and just pop a healing CD to keep the raid up. Willing to listen to any suggestions. Oh and this is for 10 man. Thanks!

I haven't done it myself but i think some guilds had 8 members(Not the tanks) pick crystals at the start, and healers pop healing cd if required. To get as many stacks up as soon as possible. Then just 2 dps get the last 20 tiles.
Also try not to have any chained people do the stacks, unless they work very well together and can run within the "limit" of the chains.

Also another tactic was to have 1 dps go tank spec and use as much stamina gear as he could, and he would focus on the stacks the ENTIRE fight. He would NEVER dps bosses, he would just run and paint floors all day long while the rest dps.

After reading the use a third tank for painting suggestion, we tried and down it on our first night. 9 wipes I think, mostly due to me failing to swap the dogs correctly. It should be a DPS gain to have one person paint the entire time (the use of a tank is so they won't get targeted by stuff, although I think it might only apply to Jasper Chains), have another 1 or 2 help at the start and when the tiles reset. Engineering boots and other speed increases are also useful here. We never made the tank stack sta or anything, although it could get dicey with the dot he had if he ran out of range.

Nothing really hard about the encounter itself, it's still mostly down to your tanks and cleaning up cobalt mines or jasper chains when the appropriate petrification is casting or you will run out of room. Also, you can have a warrior cheese the cobalt mines with avatar and the petrification up, they won't get rooted meaning they should be able to clear most of the mines, which is what I did while tanking the solo dog.

We 4 heal this to trivialise it, since the enrage requirement is roughly nothing.

2 tanks, 4 heals, 4 dps. Pull. EVERYONE paints 10 tiles, and then a couple of people do a few more, those who can do their job whilst still moving, first phase you should have 120-130

2nd phase, have everyone who is able to, put up some tiles, get at least 90.

3rd phase, we pop hero as we run with tiles, to help with the incoming damage, and again 90. Forget having 1 person do it the entire fight, have everyone do it once on each phase and you're in the money.

We 4 heal this to trivialise it, since the enrage requirement is roughly nothing.

2 tanks, 4 heals, 4 dps. Pull. EVERYONE paints 10 tiles, and then a couple of people do a few more, those who can do their job whilst still moving, first phase you should have 120-130

2nd phase, have everyone who is able to, put up some tiles, get at least 90.

3rd phase, we pop hero as we run with tiles, to help with the incoming damage, and again 90. Forget having 1 person do it the entire fight, have everyone do it once on each phase and you're in the money.

While you CAN stack over 100, the buff itself stops at 100. Mouseover your buffs from time to time and you will see that with 101 or more, you still have 100% damage increase/100% spirit increase. You can EASILY make the enrage timers by running 80 80 60 and use 3 heal 2 tank 5 dps. The method of getting as many people as possible to run tiles is best imo. When we get healers chained together we dont break them at all, to prevent them from getting chained to dps that may have to run tiles after powering down. Same thing with ranged dps and melee dps... If they are chained together, we leave them so they can run tiles together at the appropriate time. We always make sure to break traps when Cobalt is petrifying or have someone with a cd break them otherwise. The rest is "dont stand in shiny crap" and aoe raid heal. The variables to this fight are no more difficult than Halfus from BoT. Just have to realize how to manage each one and not get overwhelmed, making the encounter seem more difficult than it really is.

*note*
We do have 7+ people run the first tiles, especially depending on which petrify is being cast. If its Jade, healers can afford to run easily as their shouldn't be any life threatening damage during that time, other than tanks.

the tank with a single dog can easily run tiles, I usually get 20 stacks before I have to taunt but I can push it and get 30 and possibly 40. Also, clicking the crystal that matches the current active boss reduces the damage of the dot by 90% so anyone without a cooldown can take it (eliminating the need to have everyone bumrush the crystals and pop a healing/raid cooldown). honestly this boss isn't difficult at all with the recent nerf to how often jasper chains go out, good luck.

the tank with a single dog can easily run tiles, I usually get 20 stacks before I have to taunt but I can push it and get 30 and possibly 40. Also, clicking the crystal that matches the current active boss reduces the damage of the dot by 90% so anyone without a cooldown can take it (eliminating the need to have everyone bumrush the crystals and pop a healing/raid cooldown). honestly this boss isn't difficult at all with the recent nerf to how often jasper chains go out, good luck.

Correct! Another good thing to point out that a LOT of groups progressing on this fight might not realize at first.

dedicating a sole person to paint tiles CAN work if Jasper Guardian isn't in the equation, just something to consider, but I still don't recommend it. 5 dps can still paint while still putting damage on the boss 5x faster than one useless painter. Since the repaint phase is static for the encounter you can prepare for it and position to repaint and resume dps. In the end your raid composition will determine whats the best course of action though.

Some notes I would suggest is that you really should have the tank with 1 dog taking tiles, use 5 dps, 1 tank, 1 healer at the start to take tiles (meaning 70) then have the tank continue to take 3 more sets (100 total over time - it doesn't stack higher, don't bother!).

What was said earlier regarding jasper chains is a massive thing which shouldn't be overlooked is that if healers are linked to a DPS you break the chain asap. If healers are linked they KEEP themselves chained (avoids them subsequently being chained to a DPS), if a ranged DPS is chained to a melee you preferably break that too. When ranged are chained with ranged they should always keep chained together, it ensure that if you need more tiles they are both able to run at the same time with little risk of dying (with simple coordination).

S.Priest with hand of freedom can take almost all mines that build up if you're unlucky with cobalt petrification. Any tank with a strong CD (50% less dmg taken) can easily take a mine or two as well, just ensure they're ready to heal themselves up straight away (i.e. as a guardian I can take a mine with barkskin if I have 70%+health and 40+rage, FR heals me to full right after because of the spike in Vengence from the dmg).

Yeah, the fight's pretty easy - we managed it easily last week 2 tanks, 3 heals, 5 dps. Basically we have all dps run tiles at the start (healers and tanks too, if they're confortable with it), up to 100 stacks. After the stacks reset, we have all available dps (ie those without chains) run tiles again til 80 or so, and then do the same when stacks reset again at 40%. We one shot it last week and only had 30 or so stacks when we downed it; us tanks had finally figured out what we were doing. So, high stacks aren't essential.

Main thing to note is when dps click on the crystal which is the same colour as the petrifying guardian, they need to be aware of its energy so they dont get caught with high stacks after it overloads and they no longer have 90% reduced damage from the debuff.

How you should do it: At the beginning, have your resto druid or another healer (cus there isnt much damage at start tbh) + casters take 1-2 tiles each. ONLY click the Crystal that is active, so say Cobalt goes active, take blue crystal.

You click on it once, paint 10 tiles, then click on it once again and paint another 10 tiles. You do not lose stacks if you walk over active tiles on the ground.

If someone missclicks the wrong crystal (the one that isnt active for 90% dmg reduction) he needs to get rid of his stack asap by running away his tiles asap.

Do not take any tiles if the active boss has more than, say 75% energy to be safe.

Remember: at 75% and 40% boss health you need to restack tiles. It's way better to have ranged just STOP dps'ing and get 70-100 tiles asap cus it benefits healer mana a lot aswell.

Since there is no sudden AoE damage to the raid and it should all be linear, you should rotate CDs to catch back up in healing, cus you will fall behind most likely depending on the Guardian settup.